News About the Peep Diaries

news items about the Peep Diaries book

Peep Culture the Doc Interview in National Post

An excerpt:

Hal Niedzviecki, 40, is the author of eight books including The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbours. For the documentary Peep Culture, which premieres on CBC on Feb. 16, he installed eight cameras in his home and dives into the culture of self-exposure for entertainment. Here, Niedzviecki discusses reality TV, voyeurism and what it all means to him. As told to Melissa Leong.

“Peep Culture” is the phrase I coined to explain the culture of voyeurism and entertainment. We are learning to entertain ourselves by watching each other go about our everyday lives — our friends, our neighbours and random strangers around the world. We have this whole other kind of popular culture, which is everything from viral videos to blogs about your sex life to tweets about what you ate for dinner.

This documentary evolved out of the original book, which was The Peep Diaries. In the documentary, I take it to the next level, including installing eight cameras in my house and living with those cameras constantly on, broadcasting to the Internet while keeping up a steady barrage of tweeting, blogging and Facebooking.

In June of 1955, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, co-founder of City Lights Bookstore, launched City Lights Publications with the Pocket Poets Series. The first volume was a collection of his own poems, Pictures of the Gone World, which has since become a classic of beat literature and…
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Hal Niedzviecki is a writer, culture commentator and editor whose work challenges preconceptions and confronts readers with the offenses of everyday life. He is the author of six books including the novel The Program and the nonfiction book The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves… more...